It must be awesome to be Tom Cruise. Handsome, rich, able to look like you’re running really, /really/ fast on-screen – if you could just kick the whole Scientology thing (and maybe put some lifts in your shoes), everything would be peachy. He’s also been a part of one of the defining action franchises of the past two decades, and M:I IV seems to have cemented the pattern for the…
‘Slow-burning’ isn’t quite the word. The first hour or so of The Help is, in all honesty, rather dull. Skeeter (Emma Stone), an aspiring journalist, returns from university to Jackson, Mississippi. It’s the early ’60s, and she’s shocked at the way in which black servants are treated by her contemporaries. In a move informed, you suspect, by her career longings as much as her political ideology, she decides to write…
We can only presume it’s the fact that Michael Shannon looks a bit like a frog that’s stopped him from becoming a bigger star – although admittedly that never held Kermit back. Although his resume has over 50 acting performances on it he’s rarely been a leading man, and never carried a film as major as last year’s Take Shelter.
A little-known fact: the woman who plays Mo Harris off Eastenders is the real-life sister of Gary Oldman. And after watching her little bro play an emotionally repressed, calculating MI6 agent with all the precision of a Swiss pocketwatch in this classy Cold War-era thriller, it’s a fact that’s damn near impossible to believe.
I’m going to avoid any vehicular puns here, but to use to obvious metaphor, Drive is an American muscle car. Sleek, sexy and extremely powerful – but not overly refined or with much intricacy going on beneath the surface. But it’s an absolute triumph of style over substance, and the simplicity of what the story presents means that its effects linger for a long time afterwards. A bit like if…
On the ‘videogame movies are awful’ scale, what are you expecting? ‘Reasonably acceptable if not actually like the games’, like Resident Evil? ‘Abysmal but at least a bit atmospheric’, in the mould of Silent Hill? Or ‘it’s kicking my treasured childhood memories in the crotch with steel-toed boots’, like Super Mario Bros?
Antonio Banderas escapes the animated claws of Puss In Boots and performs in his mother tongue in Almodovar’s utterly compelling thriller. The ultimate in mad scientists, Robert Ledgard (Banderas) is a pioneering plastic surgeon creating a brand new type of synthetic skin. His guinea pig, the mysterious Vera Cruz (Elena Anaya), is a flawless example of his work but as we slowly unwind her past, we begin to understand the…
Terrence Malick does not like to be rushed. Held in high esteem for great films Days Of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, The Tree Of Life is only the fourth film for which he’s stood behind the camera in 33 years. That kind of output makes the Gran Turismo team look Usain Bolt-quick in comparison. Fortunately, he’s come back with a truly exceptional piece of work – albeit one…
The worst thing that a superhero film can do is the origin story. Spider-Man 2 was better because it didn’t spend an hour developing Peter Parker’s ‘I can do what now?’ surprise. Same for The Dark Knight, which cracked away thanks to no time wasted on Bruce’s angsty backpacking years of self-discovery. So what of a movie that focuses on the birth of an organisation?
If ever a film intro succeeds in making the viewer feel unwelcome, it’s this 1971 psychological thriller from Sam Peckinpah. As David Summer (Dustin Hoffman) and wife Amy (Susan George) drive across the tediously brown Cornish countryside, their dialogue is private and inconsequential. As the viewer, you’re eavesdropping rather than absorbing plot. It’s a central theme in Straw Dogs, and from this standoffish introduction the film only pushes you further…
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